Swimming reflections

November has come in so quietly with grey skies leaking no sunlight. No wind to disturb the water and leaves falling gently without the help of a breeze. You can hear them rustle their dry edges together as they drop, adding to the carpet along the water margin. The mat is so deep it is soft under the thin soles of our swimming shoes. The lack of focussed light gives it such a depth of colour and texture that I have to keep looking at it to believe its intensity.  
Entering the water is like deliberately footprinting onto wet cement, it seems a desecration to shatter the utter smoothness of the surface with human ripples and destroy the perfect  mirrored images of trees and mountains.   We sink without speaking into our own reflections and cold envelops us. We each swim in our own pool of cold bounded by the reach of our fingers and kick of our feet, moving through the larger un-owned expanse of chill.  And jigging out from the slow swashes of breast-stroke our ripples start their travels to the far side of the Lake, breaking the sharp edge of Melbreak into a saw-blade of jagged lines.
We turn before the burn starts to numb and wade back out . D has timed us -13 minutes. With no wind, we displace air as we have just been displacing water and wonder if we are causing invisible atmospheric ripples - especially after some particularly vigorous drying. Then D comes up trumps again with thermos coffee . It's the only remedy for regaining warmth  from within as we still carry a remnant of our pools of cold in the layers of our skin.